Cloud-hungry firms swarm into Pivotal's Cloud Foundry Foundation

PaaS tech club becomes phonebook of enterprise companies

Pivotal's fledgling foundation for its Cloud Foundry technology is proving popular even before it opens for business, with a new group of large tech companies announcing they are signing up for membership.

Pivotal announced on Thursday that eight companies had signed a non-binding memorandum of understanding to join the Foundation as gold members when it forms in the fall, in a further signal that the eponymous open source technology has a chance of becoming a major force in cloud management.

Cloud Foundry competes with an OpenStack PaaS from Rackspace named Solum and Red Hat's own OpenShift tech, but both of these technologies have notched up fewer code contributions and partnerships than Pivotal's tech.

Given the broad industry acceptance (and money - a gold membership costs $100,000 per year) that Cloud Foundry has seen, the tech looks like it has the best shot of becoming the de facto system for deploying applications onto large fleets of virtualized servers and storage.

"In addition to establishing a 10-member advisory board, the Cloud Foundry community in the past 12 months has seen an increase in contributors by 113%, contributing nearly 700,000 lines of code," Pivotal wrote in a statement.

Though there's a negligible market for platform-as-a-services tech at the moment, many companies are betting that it will become a sizeable market over time. This is because once an enterprise has done the hard work of installing a self-service infrastructure management system over their infrastructure, like OpenStack or vCloud Director, it's relatively easy to layer a PaaS over the top of that. ®